Gallipoli Read Free Page B

self-importance, when everyone, the players and the watchers together, is engrossed, and when for the moment the
whole world seems to hang on some chance caprice, some special act of daring, the turning of a card. In Constantinople this false and artificial excitement was all the more intense since no one
really knew the rules of the game, and in the uncertain jigsaw of ideas which is created by any meeting between the Eastand the West no one could ever look more than a move
or two ahead.
    But it was the personalities of the protagonists that counted, above all the personalities of the Young Turks. Even in a place with so lurid a reputation as Constantinople it would be hard to
imagine a stranger group of men. There is a dramatic quality about the Young Turks, a wild and dated theatricality, which is familiar and yet quite unreal. One tends to see them in the terms of a
gangster movie, half documentary and half extravagant make-believe, and it would be very easy to dismiss them to that convenient limbo that envelops most political adventurers had they not, just
for this instant, had such power over so many millions of men.
    Sir Harold Nicolson, who was then a junior secretary in the British Embassy, remembers them all coming to dinner at his house one day. ‘There was Enver,’ he wrote, ‘in his neat
little uniform, his hands resting patiently upon his sword-hilt, his little hairdresser face perked patiently above his Prussian collar. There was Djemal, his white teeth flashing tigerish against
his black beard: there was Talaat with his large gypsy eyes and his russet gypsy cheeks: there was little Djavid who spoke French fluently, and who hopped about, being polite.’
    The odd thing, of course, was that they should have been there at all, that power should ever have reached them in a world which still knew nothing of Nazis and Fascists in uniform, of communist
officials at a banquet.
    Talaat was an extraordinary man: yet there is a certain earthiness about him that makes him rather easier to understand than any of the others. He is the party boss, gross, hard and
good-tempered, who has his tendrils everywhere, and in place of faith possesses an instinctive understanding of the weaknesses of human nature. He began life as a post office telegraphist, and he
never really made much of an outward show of being anything more. Even now when he was Minister of the Interior, a post for which he might have been designed by nature, and virtually controller of
the Committee machine, he still had his telegraphist’s keyboard onhis desk, and, with his enormous wrists on the table, he liked to tap out messages to his colleagues
on it. Long after the others, with their uniforms and their bodyguards, had moved into splendid villas along the Bosphorus, Talaat continued to live in a rickety three-storied wooden house in one
of the poorer districts of Constantinople. Henry Morgenthau, the American Ambassador, called upon him there unexpectedly one afternoon, and found him in thick grey pyjamas with a fez on his head.
He was surrounded by cheap furniture, bright prints on the walls, worn rugs on the floor; and his Turkish wife kept peeping nervously at the two men through a latticed window while they talked.
    Most of those foreigners who knew Talaat during this summer regarded him highly and even with some liking. Morgenthau always found it possible to make him laugh, and then the animal craftiness
would subside, the dark gypsy face would relax, and he would talk with great frankness and intelligence. He had, Aubrey Herbert says, ‘strength, hardness and an almost brutal bonhomie, and a
light in his eyes rarely seen in men, but sometimes in animals at dusk’. Yet Talaat with all his sagacity and his powers of unemotional concentration seems to have felt the need of men of
action like Enver.
    Enver was the prodigy of the group, the terrible child who shocked and bewildered them all. He was distinguished by the kind of dark